The Curtain in Between
by linkin-park-at-heart
Summary: Both had facades and had always kept them in place until one day with the help of a ghost and a curtain, the barriers came crashing down.One Shot


Disclaimer- All stuff belongs to the Wonderful, the Great, Jo Rowling.

AuthorNotes: My sad attempt at fanfiction...

_Ginny Weasley was never the same after the Chamber of Secrets incident. She acted social and dated just like most teenage girls her age. She would sometimes go to the monthly "Girls' Night In" when invited by her dorm-mates and she would talk about boys with them too. Of course that was just a perfectly presented façade. No one knew that Ginny Weasley was still suffering from her encounters with the young Tom Riddle, presently known as Voldemort. Nightmares and visions of the past haunted her everyday._

_Draco Malfoy was just as everyone expected him to be, and that was the problem right there. He acted arrogantly and sneered in the faces of young ones. He tormented students no matter what year they were in, Gryffindors especially. Draco Malfoy was also the Ice Prince. He never showed any forms of facial expression except sneering and smirking. People wondered whether he even knew how to laugh or smile. No one ever saw Malfoy for what he really was, just someone who was forced to by others to act how they expected him to, until one day._

Ginny walked into the girl's bathroom on the second floor of Hogwarts. "Hello Myrtle." She heard a sigh as the ghostly, gray form of Moaning Myrtle came down from the U-bend and floated towards the dark, red-haired female. "Hello Ginny. How are you?" Ginny looked around and walked over to one of the porcelain sinks and sat down on the edge of a slightly chipped one. "Well…" Ginny said with small smile, "My façade hasn't been broken yet." Myrtle smiled back. "I just came back from the boy's bathroom and I found a case similar to yours." Myrtle said. Ginny grimaced. Myrtle had been trying to change Ginny for years, she didn't want the young sixteen year old girl ending up like her, a toilet haunting spirit, and she had been trying to find a boy that would suit Ginny too. "I told you not to go into the boy's bathroom again. I overheard Harry talking about how he felt someone's eyes on him every time he entered the bathroom, and I would like to hope that wasn't you watching him." Myrtle blushed silver as Ginny rolled her eyes. "Well," Myrtle started again, slightly miffed, "I've found a boy that finds comfort in me like you do." Ginny looked up as Myrtle uttered those last three words. "He's a….He's in a spot of trouble and was pushed into a position he doesn't want to be in. He's even cried in front of me." said Myrtle. Ginny looked surprised at this last bit of information. "And what I suppose do you want me do about this?" asked Ginny. "I want you to talk with him." answered Myrtle.

Ginny stepped up the stairs and into the hidden, curtained alcove on the fourth floor. She just about walked through the curtain when she remembered Myrtle's words. "He'll be waiting for you on the other side of the curtain. He asked me to tell you not to go through the curtains; he doesn't want you to see him.

Ginny stopped walking as soon as she reached the area of the alcove, where the dark, burgundy curtain touched the walls. She was still feeling slightly uncertain about this, but she decided to go on with it. "Hello?" Ginny asked. She heard a few footsteps on the other side of the curtain coming towards where Ginny was standing; then, a back sliding downwards against the wall, coming to a stop at where the wall met the ground – the boy had sat down. Ginny heard a soft, male voice speaking… "Sit down too." She slid down, the same way the boy had. A few moments of silence followed.

"I'm cold." she heard the voice say. Ginny wasn't sure what to make of the statement and quite frankly thought that Myrtle was playing a joke on her, setting up such a meeting. The soft voice changed to a coarse one. "I always am. You should see the way I act…you probably have. I never acted the way I want to, I'm always forced to behave the way my Mother and Father expect me to and how my house expects me to. To make matters worse, I'm to become a Death Eater by the end of this year and I don't want to. I've never shown any form of emotion that displays happiness. I'm just of a shell of a wizard, not even a real one."

Ginny listened to the boy speaking and for the first time she felt sadness. Not for herself, but for someone other than her. She'd just heard a boy she didn't even know, reveal a bit of his soul to her.

"It's… It's okay." Ginny said in what she hoped was a comforting voice. "I…I bloody well know how you –"

"You don't know how I feel." He said in a bitter voice, "Don't put up an act of sympathy if it's not real."

Ginny was taken aback. She felt downright insulted.

"Really? I don't know how you feel? I was possessed in my first year by Voldemort himself, in a diary. I was a stupid girl not to realize what was happening to me then because if I had stopped using the diary I would be normal now. Everyone thinks I've recovered from that incident and I'm just as normal as everyone else, but that's because everyone expects me to be. No one knows that I still have nightmares from my first year and that I still wake up in a sweat or in a scream, believing I'm still eleven years old and Voldemort's presence is in my body. I still feel tainted and I'll never be normal. What everyone sees is a façade; a carefully structured façade that hasn't broken till…now."

The curtain that was separating the two Hogwarts students was whipped back by a pale, aristocratic hand.

" Weasley?"

"Malfoy?"

Both students looked at each other in astonishment.

"I didn't kn–" Malfoy started off.

Ginny looked down and cut him off, "No one knew…till now."

Malfoy glanced at Ginny and started off again. "I didn't know you were still affected by the diary. I felt a bit sorry for you at the end of that year. I knew my Father had given it to you, but I couldn't stop him. I had assumed you were okay because of how you acted in the school years after that. You acted like a normal witch, but I guess that was exactly what it was – an act."

Ginny gave a small smile in spite of herself, "Yeah, it was an act. But you have an act too. I always thought you were a Death Eater in-training and that you were doing so willingly." She straight into the pale-haired boy's gray eyes, "I guess I was wrong."

Malfoy slowly stood up. "Thank you for talking with me. I never thought the day would come when a Weasley would help a Malfoy feel again." Then, this time, he smiled an actual smile.

Ginny got up and returned the gesture. "I was thinking the same exact thing.

Both students then walked away from each other and headed towards their respectable common rooms. Both with a small smile on their faces and shared feelings of understanding and gratitude for a certain ghost.


End file.
